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Jan. 24, 1997 - Art Bell

02:46:15

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Non-Lethal Weapons - Col. John Alexander

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49:03

john alexander

01:27:52

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unidentified		Welcome to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
unidentified		Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from January 24th, 1997.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, as the case may be across all these time zones, stretching from the beautiful Hawaiian and Haitian Island chains, eastward all the way to the Caribbean and the U.S. Virgin Islands, south into South America, north to the Pole and worldwide on the internet.
		This is Coast to Coast, A.M., and I'm Mark Bell.
		Good morning.
		Got a treat for you this morning.
		Dr. John Alexander is going to be my guest.
		He has been a leading advocate for the development of non-lethal weapons.
		Non-lethal weapons since he created renewed interest in that field beginning in 1989.
		His influence in the area has been so great that he publicly has been called the father of non-lethal weapons in several major publications.
		He entered the U.S. Army as a private in 1956 and rose through the ranks, retiring as a full colonel in 1988.
		During his varied career, he held many key positions in special operations, intelligence, and research and development.
		From 1966 through 69, he commanded Special Forces A teams in Vietnam and Thailand.
		His last assignment was as a director, Advanced Systems Concepts Office, U.S. Army Lab Command.
		After retiring from the Army, Dr. Alexander joined Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he was instrumental in developing the concept of non-lethal defense.
		As a program manager, he conducted non-lethal warfare briefings at the highest levels of government, to heads of industry, and at academic institutions, including Harvard and MIT.
		Dr. Alexander organized and chaired the first two major conferences on non-lethal warfare and served as the U.S. delegate to three NATO studies on that topic.
		As a member of the Council on Foreign Relations Non-lethal Warfare Study, he was instrumental in influencing the report that is credited with causing the Department of Defense to create a national non-lethal weapons policy in July of 1996.
		For several years, he's been a distinguished guest lecturer at the U.S. Air Force Air University and participated in key war games when non-lethal weapons were first being considered.
		Academically, he holds an M.A., Pepperdine University, BhD, Walden University, and later attended the Anderson School of Management at UCLA, the Sloan School at MIT, and the Kennedy School of Government General Officer Program, National and International Security for Senior Executives at Harvard.
		In addition to many military awards for valor and service, Aviation Week selected him as a 1993 Aerospace Laureate.
		He received a Department of Energy Award of Excellence in 1994 and is listed in Who's Who in America and Who's Who Worldwide.
		Dr. Alexander wrote the seminal articles on non-lethal warfare.
		He published articles in Jane's International Defense Review, the Boston Globe, and several other defense journals.
		Articles about him and his work can be found in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Newsweek, Sunday Times, London, Paranormal Italy, the LA Times, Wired magazine, GQ Scientific American, and Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and many others.
		He has appeared on international television in Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the UK, and the U.S. Currently, if all that is not enough, he's the Director for Scientific Liaison for a private research institute, serves as a consultant to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and writes independently.
		So, coming up in a few moments, Father Alexander.
unidentified		Father Alexander.
unidentified		Father Alexander.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, all right, now to Father Alexander, actually Dr. John Alexander, who is, I believe, in Las Vegas.
		Is that correct, Doctor?
		That's correct.
		Wonderful to have you on the program, and I guess if you have to be known as the father of something, being known as the father of non-lethal weapons would be the way to go.
		What in the world are non-lethal weapons?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Well, in the broadest sense, there are obviously weapons that can be applied that don't kill people in the process.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Now, it runs on the simple end, things you know about rubber bullets and nets and things like that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sure, that the police use.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		To a high end of what we call strategic incapacitation, where you can bring down a nation or a complex target set such as that, again, without dropping hard bombs and killing people.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You can bring down a nation without dropping hard bombs, smart or dumb, and killing people.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		An entire nation.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		I think you can certainly have impact on complex targets such as that, but difficult to do.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		By attacking the infrastructure targets, such as communications, electronics, electrical grids, transportation systems, you have the ability to really apply force in some unique ways.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I noticed that the little bit I read on you here, or quite a bit it really was, suggests that they are defensive non-lethal weapons.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wouldn't non-lethal weapons of the sort you're discussing, the latter sort, be really either defensive or offensive, depending on what you were trying to do?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Oh, absolutely.
		We can use these weapons across the entire spectrum of force, which means all the way up to strategic warfare.
		By definition, the United States normally prefers to think of itself as being in a defensive role even when you're using weapons offensively.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you think that's a politically accurate statement or just a politically correct statement?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think that the whole concept of national defense is in the process of changing and that what we are going to go through is a change from national defense, where we were talking about the actual survival of our country and others, to a period of national security, which I think is something that's drastically different, but I think is the political realities of the future.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Would a portion of the technology that you helped create be known as SDI?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		I'm sorry, I missed the last.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Have you known as what?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Would it be known, could it otherwise be known as SDI or part of the Strategic Defense Initiative?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Oh, SDI, in general, no.
		I don't think there's anything that in fact in the early years around 1990, 1991, as the concepts were first being developed, one of the thoughts was something like a parallel initiative.
		It certainly did not seem like there was a political will to create a new initiative.
		But I think the technologies in general would be very, very different.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Suppose we were to begin to get into a very serious situation with a country like Iran, and we wanted to, as best we could, disable them, disable their infrastructure without dropping bombs.
		How would we technically accomplish that?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Well, first, let me say, I think you've hit on a very important point.
		Let me back up a little bit and get to it.
		But you remember, one of the problems we had with Iraq is they did not believe that we were serious.
		Saddam, right up to the last minute, believed that the U.S. would back down because we were unwilling to accept casualties.
		And I think some of the systems that we have in a situation such as any of those in the Middle East is you have the ability to send a very strong message that you have the will, the intent, and the capability to use force.
		And you're going to do it.
		And by the way, one other caveat in all of these, I always maintain, that you have to have a lethal backup.
		These systems do not operate in isolation.
		If you're going to be believable, you've got to have lethal force and have an overwhelming capability.
		Having said that, I prefer not to talk about specific countries, but that gets into real political sensitivities, of course.
		But if you're going to go after a complex target, such as the one you described, all of advanced societies today rely heavily on both electricity and certainly information systems, if you will.
		So I'm sure you've heard of information warfare, the ideas of using computer viruses to bring down systems.
		You can create havoc with them in this day and age.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Perhaps you can help me out here.
		I understand that during the war with Iraq, prior to, it's fairly public knowledge, I believe, that prior to the first air assault, we somehow infected their air defense system computers with a virus and totally screwed it up.
		Can you verify that?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		I do not have any information that would support that.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		I believe the way we took them out was a good old-fashioned way, rockets.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		You remember that the first strikes going in there were with stealth aircraft.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		And so one of the big problems that they had, of course, was they literally couldn't see them.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, they were firing all over the place.
		It certainly is true.
		Firing blindly and not hitting much but an occasional bird, I suppose.
		Right.
		So we did that conventionally.
		And then, as far as you know, there is no truth to that rumor.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		No, I've heard several rumors about various kinds of computer attacks that were supposed to be done.
		There was another one that their air defense missiles supposedly had a reverse switch in, things they had bought from the French.
		But again, I've seen nothing hard that would substantiate that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, Doctor, when you first began presenting the concept or the idea of non-lethal warfare, you're talking to the guys who have practiced nothing but lethal warfare, breaking things and killing people.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How well did they accept your idea of disabling the enemy without killing?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Well, in reality, quite mixed.
		And I think the mixture tended to be based on level of responsibility.
		If I talked to guys whose responsibility was to take the next hill and get there with all of their troops alive, they would say, I want more steel on target.
		You know, just blow the hell out of them.
		If you talk to the very senior people, people who have responsibility for lives, who look at the long-term influence of application of force, they were the ones that said, I really want alternatives.
		I had talked to the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs just before we were going into Somalia.
		And this was our first major humanitarian operation.
		And he was saying, the last thing I want to do is to go in and kill people that were there to feed.
		Although that's exactly what we ended up doing.
unidentified		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		If your technology or what you have developed could have been used in Somalia, would it have been great assistance?
		Somalia is not exactly an information rich or technologically rich nation.
		Would it have been applicable there?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		It was.
		Now, there were really several distinct operations.
		Now, if you talk about Provide Hope, which was the early operation, that's one where I'm not particularly happy.
		We went in with a show of force with the assumption that if our guys went in showing rifles and bayonets, that the enemy would naturally cower in the presence of the omniscient Americans.
		And what we found was they backed off a little bit, went into a sniping mode, and it became really a horrendous situation, enough so that we eventually pulled out.
		Now, we were replaced, as you will recall, with UN forces.
		And then finally we had the extraction.
		And there was an operation called United Shield, in which we reinserted Americans and covered the extraction of the UN forces.
		And that was the first time, to my knowledge, where we openly said we have selected non-lethal weapons available.
		We took them in and on a limited basis used them.
		I would say before that, by the way, they did use OC or the pepper spray sorts of things.
		So that's about what they had during the early phases of Provide Hope.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I take it that the kind of non-lethal weapons that you work on are generally beyond pepper spray and that sort of thing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You work on the more technological type of non-lethal weapons, correct?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Well, first of all, I've sort of become a coordinator across the board, and the laboratories and industries around the country now work on a wide, wide variety of technologies.
		Some of them are really quite simple.
		There's a lot of work, for instance, going into low-impact kinetic rounds.
		You see these in law enforcement as well as in the military.
		And these are just things that will knock you on your butt rather than killing you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Rubber bullets, that kind of thing?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Well, many of them are rubber.
		There's other substances, sometimes wood.
		Sometimes they have something called the rag or the rotating airfoil grenade, which is like cloth that are expanding, but there's still sufficient impact.
		There are things, tasers and now air taser that can be electrical shock to individuals.
		The sticky phones that you're familiar with, which is actually a fairly complex substance, so it's been around for a while, developed for something quite different.
		All the way up to information warfare, which we really felt spun off on its own and has taken on a life of its own independently.
		A lot of these things have psychological implications in convincing people that they really don't want to do the kinds of things that you're trying to stop them from doing, rioting or attacking, sniping, whatever that might be.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, let's consider the Iraq war since it is history.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What kinds of informational warfare did we use against the enemy soldiers, said to number in the half million range, before the attacks really began?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Well, in Desert Storm, probably the biggest thing we did there was psychological operations.
		And as we saw, they turned out to be extremely effective.
		If you remember the pictures of tens of thousands of people surrendering, I mean, even surrendering to drones and workers and ready to get quit.
		I do.
		And part of it was intensive.
		Remember, they had fought a war for about eight years with Iran, and one of the things they had learned in that war, basically a ground war, was if you stayed in your tank, you could survive.
		And they were not prepared for our precision weapons and our day-night capability to find them and destroy the tanks.
		So very quickly, we got that, you know, they found out tanks could be hit, so we'd drop leaflets on them and say, you know, we don't care about you, don't be in your tanks because we're going to destroy them.
		Another major operation that was quite successful is to go in and they, again, simple things, dropping leaflets.
		And they went to a specific area and they said, do not be here tomorrow because the largest non-nuclear explosion that has ever occurred is going to occur at this site tomorrow.
		And then they dropped the biggest non-nuclear bomb that has ever been dropped with a huge explosion.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We did?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yes.
		It was a specially designed device built down at Sandia.
		And then we went, and the next day we dropped leaflets on either side and said, now you remember what happened in the middle?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wait, I'm very, very curious, and I suppose there are going to be areas that you can't talk about, but what did we drop?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		I'm sorry, what can what?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What did we drop?
		You said the largest non-nuclear explosion.
		What was it?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Oh, it was a special bomb that was built, I believe, actually using a big penetrating system.
		It was taking a, I believe it was a 105 tube and filling it with explosives.
		And it was strictly a high explosive type system that they just were able to put a lot of very compact high explosives in.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		We're at the bottom of the hour, Doctor, so we're going to break here for a moment.
		When we come back, I want to ask him about that device versus a fuel-air explosive device, which I had always heard was the next best thing to a nuke for killing.
unidentified		You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
		Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from January 24, 1997.
		Coast to Coast AM from January
		Coast to Coast AM from January 24, 1997.
		24, 1997.
		Coast to Coast AM from January 24, 1997.
		You're listening to Art Bell somewhere inside.
		Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from January 24th, 1997.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Welcome to the program.
		Those of you who join at this hour, anything is possible tonight.
		Anything at all.
		Who knows?
		But then again, that's kind of the way I like it.
unidentified		The End.
unidentified		The End.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Back now to Dr. John Alexander.
		And Doctor, you were talking about a device dropped in Iraq, I take it in the middle of a desert somewhere, the largest non-nuclear explosion ever seen.
		Now, I had always heard the fuel-air explosive or the mist that they drop and then ignite, literally igniting or depriving the area of oxygen, was probably the worst thing short of a nuke.
		But you're saying they made something even worse?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Well, I don't know if it's worse or better.
		I mean, that's a pejorative comment.
		It was just a big bang.
		And, of course, the point was that by using the psychological operations, we probably saved a lot of lives.
		We certainly had the Iraqis surrendering in droves.
		By the way, it dropped in Kuwait, not in Kuwait.
		It was on the southern border just before we began the ground phase of Desert Storm.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I see.
		Something I've always wondered about, we have one of the largest nuclear stashes in the world, if not the largest.
		Why do we not threaten to use nuclear weapons?
		You would think that in itself would be such a psychologically disabling threat as to just cause everybody to give up and say, no, thank you.
unidentified		That's it.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Well, in my estimation, this is just a personal issue, we have created an artificial boundary, and that is one that says nuclear weapons are so special that if you use them, you have crossed a very definite barrier, and that we will not do that except under the most excegent circumstances.
		Now, there are unconfirmed reports that one of the things that we told Baghdad, either directly or indirectly, is if they were to use biological weapons, then, you know, the gloves were off.
		Right now, I've never seen that officially confirmed, but it's certainly one of the rampant rumors about why you did not see the stockpiles that we know Saddam had being used.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There are later reports, by the way, that suggest that this Gulf War syndrome may be contagious.
		So there are some people who believe that biologicals, in fact, may have been used, and we didn't know it until later.
		Till now.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		Gulf War Syndrome, of course, is making the press, and I think we've got an awful lot more to learn about what that is.
		I mean, it's certainly looking like whatever was causing it was a series of very complex things.
		Everybody who's looked at it that I know has just not found one simple solution.
		And part of it may have been things that we induced bringing them into the troops as counters to chemical and biological agents.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's true.
		In other words, the inoculations they receive, that sort of thing, sure.
		Could be.
		Again, though, let us return to the original premise.
		Any country, your choice, so it's non-political, if we wanted to disable their infrastructure, what kind of weapon could do that without killing?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Well, of course, the whole series of information warfare, i.e.
		putting viruses in virtually every nation, even in the developing countries, their economic systems, their transportation systems, air traffic control, communication systems are all run by computers.
		Oh, that's true.
		So bringing them down, it is true that you can harden systems, but you pay a tremendous price for that.
		And so it's much like we did with the Soviets, it's just too expensive to harden everything, so you can't protect them.
		Tremendous amounts of pulse power induced into electrical grids we know will burn out selected electrical equipment.
		You can short things out.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is there a way to induce a gigantic pulse, for example, into a nation's electrical system short of a nuclear detonation?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
		And one of the things we have now, of course, is with precision weapons, you can fly very close to your target so that electrical pulse can be produced by standard explosives as well as by nuclear.
		It's just more exaggerated in the nuclear one.
		And that of course we found out after World War II as kind of an unexpected side effect.
		But you get a huge footprint.
		One of the problems with such systems is that you've got to be quite a ways away from them yourselves or you have this tremendous retroside issue because your equipment can be as subjected to the pulse as is the adversaries.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is there work being done on the ability to produce a directed pulse of the kind we're talking about, short of a nuclear explosion or a conventional iron bomb or smart bomb, you know, dropped on transformers?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In other words, are we close to beam weapons?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		The whole field of directed energy has, in fact, been looked at for several decades.
		And pulse power is one of the systems in there.
		Of course, we have lasers and particle beams.
		We have been able to get power levels up.
		You can do some things in directionality.
		It's a fairly sophisticated and difficult task, however.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Of the weapons, I'm trying to get a sense of how much you know that you can't talk about.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So of the weapons that we're able to talk about, and considering your field of knowledge in its totality, what percentage can you not talk about?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		I would say less than 5%.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Less than 5%.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		And mostly it's not the generic stuff.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		It's when you get into specific capabilities.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In other words, exactly.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Most of the weapons are actually fairly well known.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		I've heard, for example, that it is, they're working on a device.
		The police are, for the police in this country, to be able to disable a speeding or fleeing vehicle by somehow pulsing it with something that will simply shut its entire electrical system down.
		How do they do that?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		With great difficulty.
		And I'm very skeptical of the people who say they can do that.
		And that comes from a lot of years of looking at that sort of problem.
		And the problem is this.
		Electrical systems, even from one car to another, vary tremendously.
		And it also varies even more so if you start looking at diesel engines, for instance.
		When we have tested various electronic equipment, we find tremendous variability from one system, from one identical piece in a system to an identical piece in another system.
		In other words, the same pulse to the same type of equipment does not respond the same way every time.
		The other issue that you have is the one that I mentioned earlier, and that's fratricide.
		If I have a pulse that will wipe out the car that I'm chasing, it'll probably get mine and all of the other cars that are just coincidentally in the area.
		I'm very skeptical of that.
		I keep hearing tremendous claims, and I have yet to see it work where law enforcement agencies would be comfortable using them.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I understand.
		It's too bad there's this ratricide problem.
		I was imagining its use on a tough and frustrating day on the L.A. freeways.
		So all of this really is still very much in development and not necessarily practical yet.
		I mean, you've described a weapon here that really, because of the problem that you would do it to yourself, it's not very practical, very difficult to use.
		On the other hand, if you could bring it in, bring the weapon in and leave it like a time bomb so that it would go off and then get the hell out of the way, then it might have some application.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Or, as I was saying before, with precision-guided systems, you can now fly them in.
		If you get back to the nation-state kind of target, I mean, you can fly within a few meters of the target that you're trying to hit.
		If I have that kind of precision, then I can control the collateral effects.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Doctor, you know, you talk about the information-rich societies, societies that depend for their infrastructure on computers.
		I can't think of any that is more dependent than we are.
		So if we're designing this technology, and if you look at the world in general, it seems to me we are one of the richest targets for this kind of technology, maybe the richest in the world.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So how vulnerable are we?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Tremendously.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		And the problem that you run into here is a question of how much security do you want and how much of your civil rights are you willing to trade off to obtain that?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		If I had a large weapon capable of pulsing, even if it was pretty good size, if I could get it somewhere near the Pentagon or an important computer record center, I could do some very, very serious damage that would make the conventional truck bomb look like a firecracker.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		The targets you selected there happen to be ones that tend to be very hardened because they are aware of it if you go to the key target.
		But if I were to go, as you know, here in Las Vegas, we have something, you know, Bank America down here.
		All of financial transactions, for instance, tend to be, that are not through the federal government per se are really vulnerable.
		All the telecommunications systems, again, that don't belong to the government, you know, the backup systems that are there for national emergencies, all the commercial ones, they're the ones that are vulnerable and they handle the bulk of the information load in the country.
unidentified		What about Wall Street?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Did you read Debt of Honor?
unidentified		No.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Tom Clancy's book, and that's based on the premise that a virus, in that case a Trojan horse, was left on Wall Street and time to collapse it.
		Certainly would be very, very serious.
		We had those problems, you know, during the bombing in the Trade Center.
		They actually took out the New York Stock Exchange, but one of the major international exchanges was there, and it went down for hours.
		It really interrupted things not only then, but it developed a lack of confidence in our ability to protect the system.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Let me tell you, Doctor, it took me off the air.
		The audio feed that goes from here to Oregon and then back to the East Coast was routed through there, and we were off the air for quite some number of hours before they got everything rerouted.
		So it affected a very great deal with communications.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, most people think we just knocked down a building and shook up a few hundred people, and that's not the case at all.
		It had the potential or had serious effects much larger than are generally known and had the potential to be even larger than that.
		We were quite lucky in many ways.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you think that the communications was one of the targets?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In other words, that they understood what they would disrupt with that bomb, short of bringing the World Trade Center down?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		No, my estimation is that this was strictly a political gesture and that the real damage was purely secondary.
		It was designed to demonstrate, and it certainly did effectively, that terrorism was no longer something that happened over there.
		It was something that did happen in the United States.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you expect us to suffer more at the hands of the terrorists in the next number of years?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		In my estimation, yes.
		I think terrorism is going to be a very cost-effective way if you're an adversary.
		I think that Desert Storm was tremendously effective, but it also sent a message around the world that if you want to test us, you don't do it head to head.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you have any information on how far Saddam has come since the war with regard to rebuilding, restructuring, lessons learned, and what he might have in mind?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Well, the latter, I don't think anybody knows what he has in mind.
		And I only see the same reports that you do that he has certainly rebuilt his conventional forces to a degree more than we had anticipated that he would be able to in that period of time.
		And of course, the constant reports that he had certainly chemical and biological capabilities and may be in fact continuing to do so.
		He's certainly not played by the rules that were laid down to him.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm going to ask you to put yourself in a very difficult position, but it might be an interesting exercise, or maybe you should not do it, I don't know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But if you were on the other side and you were wanting to attack this country with some massive non-lethal technology that would do great harm, what would you do and where would you attack?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		or you can refuse to answer that yeah that's one i think i know enough about the systems and the vulnerability that i'd like i would choose the the opponents to figure that out for themselves i see I don't blame you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		This is a very sensitive subject because the things we're talking about, you want specifics on them, but you can't exactly give them.
		What is the latest that you can tell us that we're working on that we could use short of the iron bombs and the lots of steel on target, as you were talking about?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Well, the technologies that are being worked on are really on a very wide scale.
		And I think that one of the things you need to look at is what's the kind of operations are we going to be involved in?
		Because the things we've been discussing here primarily address mid-to-high intensity war.
		And that cannot be neglected.
		Having said that, the whole area of peace support operations, which range from peacekeeping, peacemaking, humanitarian operations, you can argue whether or not we should be involved.
		And certainly those arguments go on inside the military.
		And my position on that is that we have been involved in peace support operations, we are involved in peace support operations, and we will be.
		What that means is that there are a wide range of such operations for which we just need to be able to control people, at the same time protecting our forces.
		Situations like Somalia, like Haiti, like Bosnia, and others that are going to emerge.
		And so simple kinds of things.
		We overlook, for instance, the situation in which I have a friendly crowd, and friendly crowds can hurt you.
		I have friends who were in Haiti after the uphold democracy, and the troops are on the ground, and one of the big problems with dumping trash.
		You see the videotapes of here are people that are so destitute that they will swarm over and fight voraciously for the ability to pick through our trash.
		And so what happened is you needed a way for the troops to dump the trash and get out of there before that happened.
		You certainly didn't want to shoot people whose only offense was to try to get to your trash before somebody else did.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So what do you do?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Well, this is one where you can use a wide range of things, rubber bullets if you have to apply force.
		There's a host of low-level electrical systems as you see in law enforcement agencies.
		In some cases, sound is being developed where you can create sonic barriers that can then be removed.
		Others include simple things like smells, goo guns.
		And a system that was used in Somalia successfully was a laser.
		But that might be something we want to talk about next hour because I think it'll be a bit of a discussion.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I am very, very interested in lasers, and I'm also very interested in whether they have application from space yet, or whether you think they will, or whether our atmosphere will so diffuse the power of a laser as to make it useless from orbit.
		That's a point of fascination for me, so we will talk about that when we come back.
		All right, Doctor, stand by.
		My guest is generally known as the father of non-lethal weapons.
		How's that for a title?
		He is Dr. John Alexander.
		He's in Las Vegas, not far from where I am here in the high desert.
		I'm Art Bell.
unidentified		You're listening to Art Bell somewhere in time on Premier Radio Networks.
		Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from January 24, 1997.
		Coast to Coast AM from January
		24, 1997.
		Coast to Coast AM from January 24, 1997.
		Coast to Coast AM from January 24, 1997.
		Freebier Radio Networks presents Art Bells Somewhere in Time, tonight's program originally aired January 24th, 1997.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		My guest is Dr. John Alexander.
		He's generally known as the father of non-lethal weapons in the world, in the West, which means the world, because we lead the world in this kind of technology.
		And in a moment, we are going to discuss lasers.
		The End The End All right, I guess I better get this on the air from Hawaii.
		Art for your many, many fans in Hawaii, and I've had a lot of faxes, KHVH has gone off the air in Honolulu in the middle of your program for the past two nights.
		They're going to do it again tonight.
		I suspect some Art Bell fans have been surrounding the station with burning torches, threatening to torture.
		Well, tonight, the station read a statement apologizing for cutting off your program, begging our indulgence.
		They explained they're having transmitter adjustments to make.
		With your many years in radio, could you please explain to your Hawaii fans why it is necessary to shut the whole station down for three nights in a row to work on the transmitter?
		I have refrained from making a nasty call myself, but I'm sure the poor folks at KHVH have gotten an awful earful.
		Aloha.
		Yeah, sure I can.
		Look, radio stations are complex electronic mechanisms that include transmitters and links and microwave and all the rest of it.
		And occasionally, it is necessary to do electronic maintenance lest there be a failure.
		Sometimes that will require several days in a row of shutting off in the middle of the night.
		Sometimes they replace transmitters.
		Sometimes they clean them out.
		Sometimes they do antenna work.
		Indulge them because that is what keeps it on the air the rest of the time.
		So douse your torches, folks, and thank them for carrying the program.
		And please indulge them with respect to the electronic work they've got to do.
		And do not call them and make nasty calls.
		They are doing this so that in the end, it will be more dependable.
		Take it easy there in Hawaii.
		Back now to Dr. John Alexander, considered to be the father, the father of non-lethal weapons, I guess, in the world.
		And, Doctor, we were about to talk about lasers.
		And I am particularly interested in lasers.
		I've got a little bitty one that I got from one of my sponsors, Seacrain Company, and my cats love it.
		You know, it's a little dot that races around the room, and the cats chase it thinking it's a little red bug.
		I suspect there may be more to lasers than amusing cats.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Well, there are.
		But actually, the little red dot turns out to be very effective.
		But lasers, of course, are a very, very broad topic and have brought conferences on whether or not we should have lasers on the battlefield.
		There are those who would ban them altogether, which I think is ridiculous.
		But nonetheless, you do have people who would take that position.
		The fear, of course, is that lasers are going to be used as blinding systems.
		And one of the things I always say that eyeballs and testicles are emotional issues.
		We don't listen to a lot of facts when we talk about them.
		And so the idea that you might have systems that blind is of quite a bit of concern.
		And the answer is there are lasers that could be put on the battlefield that could blind.
		Now, we also know that lasers are used in our ranging systems.
		Remember from, again, Desert Storm, how we were able to hit the tanks with that accuracy had to do with laser range finders that could tell us exactly where they were.
		Also, you have precision-guided systems, and sometimes that guidance is a laser spot.
		So I just do not see the potential for taking them off the battlefield.
		I do not see them equally being used as a system to cause mass blindness.
		I think that would be patently illegal, and such systems would be terminated to be illegal under all the treaties and conventions that we have.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Why would that be?
		That just doesn't make sense to me.
		If you could blind an enemy, effectively taking him out, requiring assistance from somebody who still has their eyesight, you've taken two people off the battlefield and you have not killed.
		So why is that inhumane compared to dropping a 2,000-pound bomb and blowing people into little bitty pieces?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think the whole ethics of war issue is an oxymoron.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		However, there are a set of rules that we have agreed to, and one of those rules is no blinding systems.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No blinding systems.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		For instance, well, you can't maim.
		Some people don't know it, but you know the M16 rifle that we brought in during the Vietnam era.
		Before that, we had the AR-15, and initially, the bullet that was fired from that was barely stable.
		And the point was that as it would go through the air, it would start to tumble.
		And it was banned.
		They had to come up with a higher power one that had more stability because the tumbling system would probably not kill you, but it would cause excessive damage.
		It would tear limbs Off and whatnot.
		So that would be considered maiming.
		I mean, the whole set of rules, you know, I can stick you, and I can burn you if I intend to kill you.
		I just can't do it if I intend to hurt you.
unidentified		Oh, who set up these rules?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		As a matter of interest.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, where do they come from?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Oh, well, we've had conferences and treaties have been set up by all the Western nations.
		Red Cross is deeply involved.
		Of course, now the UN, before that, the earlier organizations.
		And we have a whole series of things called the laws of land warfare that have been agreed to.
		Many of them came out after World War I, of course.
		The whole issue on chemical weapons because of the abhorrence of what we saw from mustard gas that we used in trench warfare then.
		You know, we have the problem now that, and this occurred in Waco, of course, where there are agents that you can use against our own civilian populations that cannot be used in war.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		Yes, that's true.
		Back to lasers for a moment.
		There were reports, substantial reports, toward the end of the Cold War of several of our pilots and or co-pilots being blinded by lasers in aircraft.
		Are you aware of those reports?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yes.
		And as you remember, just a little over a year ago, we had that happen right here in Las Vegas.
		The reason we don't have the laser light shows anymore.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Uh-huh.
		You know, I was not aware of that.
		What happened?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Oh, you remember the lasers that were on the downtown hotels that were flashing around the sky?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yes.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		I believe it was a Southwest pilot that got hit in the eye and took him out of commission for like three weeks before he could fly.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, boy.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		And it was while he was on the approach to the airport, and I think it was December 95 that the order went out to stop the hotels here from flashing them about.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I refuse to believe that our military is not, if it is an effective weapon, working really hard on laser technology to blind the other guys' pilots.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Well, let me address that because there are things that can be done with lasers that are eye-safe.
		In other words, rather than working on blinding the pilot, per se, against the eyeballs, you can take a continuous wave laser, use it against the cockpit.
		And as you know, inside the cockpit, there really are little tiny fractures.
		So as the light hit, it diffracts, meaning the pilot cannot see outside.
		Now, you haven't damaged his eyeballs or not, but these are bright enough, and we did this when I was at Los Alamos, that you can, you're familiar with the heads-up display or the HUD.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		You can take that away because of so much illumination on the outside.
		So if a pilot were trying to attack a target, they just couldn't see it very well.
		It's a very good method for warning.
		It's one of the things, one of the NATO studies I was involved in was non-lethal means for working on non-cooperative aircraft.
		Basically, how do you enforce a no-fly zone?
		And it turns out there's a lot of reasons to transit a no-fly zone.
		I won't go into all of those sorts of things.
		Most of them are economic.
		So if you have a situation where a pilot's flying through there, one of the things you want to do is warn them.
		And this was a technology that we said would be very effective.
		You put the spot on there, and the pilot would know without a doubt that they have been taken under surveillance, and if they continue, they'll probably get a rocket at the tailpipe.
		It would have been a good alternative, if you remember what happened with Vincennes with the Airbus incident.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Of course.
		That would have been an alternative prior to the rocket.
		Right.
		Do you have any thoughts on TWA Flight 800?
		Everybody is at a complete standstill with regard to any real cause of what brought that airplane down.
		There have been a lot of suggestions, and that's really all they are.
		There have been some pretty wild ones as well.
		Have you looked at that at all?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		No, I have a guess there, but it's no better than anybody else's.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		I come down on the side of a very unfortunate accident.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you buy the conventional explanation they're leaning toward the heated air conditioning units causing some?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		I'm not sure what specific unit, but my guess is that you talked before about fuel air.
		That's basically what you're talking about, is a fuel air explosion.
		Set off or something.
		But again, I'd like to get into any detail because I do not have any more knowledge than probably less than many of the people listening.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Lasers, again, lasers.
		I understand that it would be possible to pulse a laser from space, a satellite, to build up a pulse.
		Would it be possible to use a laser with any effectiveness or microwave radiation with any effectiveness from space to Earth?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		I think the best bet for space-based systems or even high-altitude systems are things like missile defense.
		And the idea is not to try and burn holes through the atmosphere.
		What you were alluding to before is exactly right.
		Atmosphere causes big problems.
		The lower you get, the more power it takes, the more potential it is to dissipate the energy.
		However, if you're firing laterally, say against ICBMs that are being launched, it's probably going to be effective in those areas.
		There was a model that was done looking at airborne lasers, you know, it's the airborne laser lab that the Air Force now has, but looking down, and you've got to control for something like 29 different variables.
		And things like the amount of moisture in the atmosphere, wind, temperature gradients, I mean, the list just goes on and on.
		So to use them effectively, I think the problem is if you attempt to do it, then your power requirements go up, and then you've got to have huge power sources.
		Again, I think the way you use them on high-altitude platforms is laterally.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Laterally.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So a laser fired through space, not having to traverse the atmosphere or very much of it, could conceivably blow a hole right through an ICBM.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Oh, they've done that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I've also seen it done, and I forget whether it was at Los Alamos or White Sands or somewhere or another, they actually showed on television a demonstration of a missile blown up in mid-flight in the atmosphere from the ground.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Again, you can do this.
		The less air you have, the better.
		We estimated that at ground level, I used to work in one of my jobs, chief of advanced systems concept.
		They had all of the directed energy systems that the Army was working on at the time from a technology perspective.
		And we looked at lasers.
		We always wanted a laser weapon as an air defense system.
		I mean, that was going to be the ideal deep magazine.
		You could drill on planes and move it about quickly and whatnot.
		And it turns out that at about three kilometers, the amount of energy that is needed to push any further starts rising almost exponentially.
		And it just got to where you couldn't do it if you're operating anywhere near sea level.
		Higher altitudes, you can get a little bit farther.
		That's why an airborne system where you're above most of Earth's atmosphere does make sense.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What doesn't make sense to me is you tell me we can use lasers in space and make lateral shots at ICBMs that might be, for example, in a boost phase and bring them down.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And we are not doing that, or at least publicly we're not doing it.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I think we are.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, we are.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, the Airborne Laser Lab, which has been on and off.
		Should I put this?
		The guy who ran SDI, or it became ballistic missile defense, was my boss at one point.
		And he was eventually a lieutenant general with a Ph.D. in laser physics and did not have a lot of faith.
		He preferred much more the hit-to-kill mechanisms.
		In other words, a kinetic system where I actually hit the device and bring it down that they have greater confidence in it.
		And I think it's a good bit of it's just a confidence issue.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, it is true, isn't it, that a kinetic weapon, in other words, something that would approximate a shotgun shell, extraordinaire, fired at something, it would only take a little tiny thing the size of a BB kinetically to hit this thing and disable it and blow it up.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		That's correct.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So that is a cheap way to stop something of that sort.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		The issue with all directed energy systems is that we have spent decades and tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in developing them.
		They were promoted with very, very high promise, and the promise has not been fulfilled.
		There have been advances, but they have never met the spectacular performance that the early advocates were promising.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Have we come very far with biological weapons?
		You talked about sound.
		What can we do to somebody with the right frequency and the right sound and the right decibel level?
		Can we disable human beings?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Well, the whole infrasound issue is one that's pretty interesting.
		There are now acoustic weapons that are being developed or have been developed that are fairly effective.
		And it's just a matter of hitting you with a frequency issue, a lot of waves.
		You turn it off and the person's fine.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'll tell you what.
		When we get back, let's just get right down to cases and find out what you can do to a person.
		My guest is the father of non-lethal weapons, Dr. John Alexander.
		Interesting stuff.
		I'm Art Bell.
unidentified		You're listening to Art Bell somewhere in time.
		Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from January 24, 1997.
		Coast AM from January
		Coast AM from January 24, 1997.
		24, 1997.
		You're listening to Arc Bell somewhere in time on Premier Radio Networks.
		Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM From January 24th, 1997.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Once again, here I am.
		Dr. John Alexander is my guest, and we'll get back to him in a moment.
		One of the new features on our World Wide Web page is a bulletin board.
		Oh boy, is it a big bulletin board with any number of topics all relating to what we talk about on the air.
		I suggest you go take a look at www.artbell.com.
		We have many photographs up there as well.
unidentified		We have many photographs up there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, back now to Dr. Alexander.
		And Doctor, a lot of people are beginning to fax in questions now.
		So let me ask you this.
		Do you know anything?
		Apparently something using microwave energy instead of a laser energy?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Yes, I really don't know a lot about it.
		There are a whole bunch of things in directed energy that various types of energy, and that just happens to be one of them.
		I'm not terribly familiar with those particular systems.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		I've also got an article here entitled Physics and Weapons in Bang Bang You're Alive.
		It's titled.
		And it talks about various weapons of the sort that you're talking about.
		One of them, as a matter of fact, this is, I'm sitting here looking at an article by you, as a matter of fact.
		What I want to ask you about is remote viewing.
		And I guess that's what you wrote about here, or that sort of technology.
		Do you believe it has a use?
		Do you believe it is real?
		The Ed Dames type of remote viewing.
		Ed Dames, of course, was a military remote viewer.
		What do you know about that?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Quite a bit.
		Quite a different topic from where we are.
		I want to discuss it a bit, of course.
		I know Ed very well.
		Remote viewing is obviously the ability to obtain data at a distance.
		And sometimes it works very well.
		From my perspective, there are some serious signal-to-noise problems.
		By that I mean sometimes you can get excellent signal.
		Other times you get things that most viewers believe are accurate and they turned out not to be terribly accurate.
		But the biggest issue is sometimes it works and sometimes it works quite well.
		Other times it doesn't work very well at all.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Are you familiar with the work of Ed Dames specifically?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You said you know him.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		I know Saitak and I know a number of the claims that he's made.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		I tend to be much more conservative.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		If you were in charge of a military non-lethal weapons division, would that be part of your setup?
unidentified		No.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		The reason I say that is that not because of any belief of how effective it is.
		I think that the remote viewing is an appropriate intelligence gathering tool.
		I do think that many of us we haven't discussed in non-lethal weapons, they have tremendous implications for intelligence both before and after.
		But I do think it's a viable tool that should be used in conjunction with other tools.
		I think one of the big problems that the military had is that remote viewing units were used as a court of last resort if there were just no other way to get the information they needed.
		And then they wanted to know who, what, when, why, where.
		And no other system they had would give them that.
		So you would not expect a fledgling system such as remote viewing to provide those kind of data.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Let's come back to where we were before the break-in.
		Now, I was about to ask you, biologically, take the situation at Waco, for example.
		Okay.
		What could be done to those people biologically?
		What can you achieve biologically from a distance with sound or any other technology?
		Is there a way to disable people at a distance, literally driving them?
		Well, I don't know.
		You tell me.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think the conspiracy theorists will not be terribly happy with a lot of my answers.
		But the real answer is when you're looking at trying to affect people at a distance, it is extremely difficult.
		We have looked for the Holy Grail for I don't know how long, and that would be some kind of system that could induce an instantaneous catatonic state.
		I say that as opposed to just relaxing them.
		Are you familiar with the dead man switch?
		You know, where the terrorist holds the hand grenade with the pinpole, so if he relax, it still goes off.
		The problem with trying to incapacitate people quickly is that if you do it, say, chemically, which has certainly been looked at quite a bit, either through darts or gas or whatever, there is too much variability in human makeup.
		Most of these things operate based on body weight and health condition.
		So a substance that would stop a say a 200-pound man that's in good condition would easily kill a lot of other people.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's a good point.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Most of the time the military and law enforcement, they want a system that is absolutely reliable.
		They want to know that if they put a dart in somebody, they may be willing to use that.
		They want to know it will stop them.
		They don't want somebody to get back up and shoot at them.
		The problem in law enforcement is that they run into a lot of people who are chemically altered.
		Things like angel dust, where anything that induces pain or even it's hard to short out the nervous system.
		So the idea of physically incapacitating people and particularly quickly is extremely difficult.
		It's certainly been looked at for a long time, but I know of no system that meets those requirements.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What effect can you have on people with sound?
		Can you annoy them?
		Can irritate them?
		What can you do?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but that's not terribly effective.
		As we saw in Waco, when they did that, what we found out was that Quresh's had a better speaker system, and they just turned their music up and kept the HRT up late at night.
		So I think the idea, remember we tried that with Noriega as well during Just Cause.
		He was trapped in the nunsio and played rock music, which certainly irritated a lot of people, but that was certainly not the force that brought him out of the building.
		What we're talking about now in acoustic weapons, though, are systems that will actually vibrate you to the point where people can collapse.
		Now, the issue is that they'd be able to get back up or, out of their own volition, leave the area.
		So it's not a loud noise.
		There's too many countermeasures.
		The quickest one, of course, is just put your fingers in your ears.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So, you know, in a way, as I listen to a lot of this, non-lethal many times seems to equate to non-effective.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is that unfair?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I think so.
		However, you've touched on, I think, an area that is one of the major ones that must be addressed, and that is how do you measure effectiveness?
		We understand hard bombs and bullets pretty well.
		We understand a burning hole out in the desert.
		We don't understand the tank isn't moving.
		Does that mean it's really dead?
		Can these things come back to life?
		There are many non-lethal weapons that are really quite effective on the low end, the kinds of anti-personnel things.
		We know how to deal with them and how to measure it pretty well.
		When you get into the anti-materiel systems, the larger ones, very difficult if I want to measure how much information is moving, how much electricity is available, how much fuel is available, what the quality is of it, and those sorts of things.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, we've talked about a number of weapons, and a lot of them, lasers, not effective through the atmosphere, sound effective, but you can hold your ears.
		And so, in a lot of ways, they don't seem effective.
		Psychological weapons, yes, effective, I suppose, prior to something that, but then again, you've got to have the backup and be prepared to use the real weapons if you're really going to mix it up.
		So what would you classify, if you were to lay out the most effective non-lethal weapons that you could use, what would they be?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		I think they run a wide range.
		Let me adjust lasers again.
		We left that one a little early, and I'd like to give you an example of what was done in Somalia.
		One of the major problems we had there were snipers, and what would happen is the snipers would be surrounded by willing hostages, namely women and children.
		And up until that time, our response was just to shoot everybody.
		I mean, we'd bring in helicopters with mini-guns, and we killed lots and lots of folks.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I recall that.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		One of the things that was done with a laser out of Kirtland Air Force Base was being able to bring in a laser spot, and it's much like what you've seen in the movie.
		You talked about the red dot before, having the cat around.
		Remember in the movies where you have the prison riots and the red dot goes on the guy's chest and they go, oh, you mean me?
		Same thing was used in Somalia.
		Again, this was at the time when we were handing the exfiltration.
		A story that's told by the Town of Island who had the system there.
		They had a green laser and they were shining it and they spotted a mortar crew a couple of kilometers away and they were setting up inside a building and they put the laser spot through there and they had four people come over to the window with their hands up trying to surrender to it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's a very effective attention-getting thing to do.
		That's right.
		If you see a red dot on your chest, it has deep meaning.
		And so you're saying that even in a crowd where you might have shields being used, which is much the case in the kind of warfare we seem to be conducting, you can single out the person you really want and say, stop that.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		They had several, they were able to stop the sniping just by putting a spot out there, and they had several cases where they spotted the person with a rifle, you put the laser on him, and again, these are ISAFE lasers, they do no physical damage to him, but the idea that this person has been pointed out, and they obviously know there are lethal backups, was sufficient to stop them.
		There are many systems that are really quite effective.
		I think the law enforcement agencies around the country, I've had the SWAT team here in Las Vegas actually use for a demonstration one of the television programs that you mentioned.
		And these are best in a scenario that is a little bit slow developing, not one where the officer on the street suddenly bumps into somebody.
		But we have a hostage barricade situation.
		As you know, we have those periodically.
		Somebody's irate and threatening their neighbors and going in and they shoot them with wooden bullets.
		The alternative, of course, is to shoot them with real bullets.
		And they said, usually the next day, after they've calmed down, they come in and thank them for being alive.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What does a wooden bullet do to you when it hits you?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		I'm sorry, you're getting a little weaker.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, my question was, what does a wooden bullet do to you when it hits you?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		It gives you a big bruise.
		It's just a matter of it's fired from a device like a grenade launcher, a standard grenade launcher, and it's about a 40 millimeters and 38 to 40 millimeter wood round.
		And it's just a tremendous thud.
		I've got a picture taken in the San Jose, Mercury, where you can see the individual getting hit.
		He's chasing the police officers with an axe.
		And as he gets hit, I mean, it literally rocks him back so his heels are off the ground.
		So it backs quite a thud, and you'll definitely have a bruise the next morning, but most likely not be dead.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And you'll probably think you were killed.
		Here's a question for you, Doctor.
		Please ask Dr. Alexander about any involvement or knowledge he may have about the MK Ultra Project Monarch.
		Do you know anything about that?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Only what I've read.
		That's old CIA stuff, so it's certainly not related.
		That's the hallucinogens research.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you know what results were realized from that project?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you have any idea of giving people LSD, that sort of thing?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Again, I've read a good bit of the literature from it.
		I'll tell you one thing, and again, I think the conspiracy theorists will not like this answer, but having been in the agency and talking to senior people, one of the lessons or things that they learned from that is not something that they would want to touch.
		In my estimation, in talking to people who either were involved or close to such operations, they believe that the political mood of such or of the country and the certainly leaders on the hill, anybody who participates in that is playing you bet your agency.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You bet your agency.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		And I would also say, remember, talking about big organizations, you still find individuals.
		And I find usually it is younger people who didn't live through that era who come in and say, well, wouldn't it be great if we had some kind of mystical agent, you know, magic dust or something like that, that we could sprinkle over and incapacitate people.
		But the people who lived through it, and I've been counseled by some pretty senior folks there, said not something they would undertake.
		They think the repercussions from Congress would be swift and severe.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's been a long time, Doctor, since we've been in a really serious war.
		Now, I'm not saying Desert Storm was not serious.
		It certainly was.
		But it turned out the enemy did not have the ability to resist as we thought they might.
		In other words, they collapsed rather easily.
		If we get into another serious war, let us say trouble on the Korean Peninsula comes to mind, something at that level, how long do you think these non-lethal devices would be used before the real people in power, the generals, said, forget that?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Well, the answer to that is not at all.
		I don't think that's a situation in which you would use non-lethal under any circumstances.
		And in the policy that was signed by the Deputy Secretary of Defense, one of the things that's made clear is even if we have non-lethal weapons, we reserve the right to use lethal weapons first.
		It doesn't mean that we will necessarily have a gradiated response.
		My point is that I believe that the nature of conflict has basically changed.
		I believe there are still bad actors.
		Saddam is out there.
		Iran is a danger.
		North Korea is a danger.
		There are others in the world who could be a major conventional threat.
		And for them, you need an absolutely highly lethal, highly mobile force.
		Having said that, we also have these emerging threats, many of whom don't have an address.
		And therein is where you really have a problem.
		If you're fighting a standard army, rule one is we win, but we know how to do that.
		You might get hurt in the process, but we're going to win.
		But we have a whole host of emerging threats.
		And I'll give you an example, something like the Kali cartel.
		If you say drug cartels are a threat to national interests, how do you respond to that?
		And I think our response so far has been not very effective.
		But you can't go bomb the Kali cartel.
		They're resident Inside the sovereign state of Colombia.
		They have an agricultural system, a manufacturing and distribution system that runs through many, many countries.
		And we've got to remember, part of them are us.
		So to try and bring force against adversaries such as these is going to be difficult.
		Organized crime in the future, if not already today, is beyond the capability of law enforcement agencies to deal with it.
		And I think, well, I've got memos from the Bureau and CIA and others who have met up.
		This is a trillion-dollar economy, bigger than most of the countries in the world.
		How do you bring force against such entities in the future?
		You can't line them up and use bombs and tanks.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So then we get to your kind of warfare.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		I think we're going to be forced into it.
		I think it provides options.
		I want to emphasize it's not a panacea.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I understand.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Don't suggest that.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		It provides us options in situations wherein classical hard bombs, tanks, aircraft carriers.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Doctor, hold on.
		We're at the top of the hour.
		We'll be right back.
unidentified		We'll be right back.
		We'll be right back.
		You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere inside, tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from January 24th, 1997.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And my guest is Dr. John Alexander, and we're about to go to the phones.
		If you have questions regarding non-lethal weapons, he has been called the father of non-lethal weapons, probably in the world.
		Dr. Alexander organized and chaired the first two major conferences on non-lethal warfare, served as a U.S. delegate to three NATO studies on the topic, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations non-lethal warfare study, and has a resume as long as several arms.
		Academically, an M.A. from Pepperdine University, Ph.D., Walden University, and later attended the Anderson School of Management at UCLA, the Sloan School at MIT, the Kennedy School of Government, General Officer Program, National and International Security for Senior Executives at Harvard, and on and on and on.
		And we'll get back to him in a moment.
		All right, here we go.
		Once again, Dr. John Alexander, the subject, non-lethal weapons, weapons you can use that will disable or accomplish a goal for you, including at the national level with regard to infrastructure and all the rest of it, but not kill.
		It is an interesting topic, and here once again is Dr. Alexander.
		Doctor, we've got a lot of people who would like to ask you questions.
		Are you up for that?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Okay, let's have them.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, let's do it then.
		West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. John Alexander.
		Hi.
unidentified		Hi, this is John from San Clemente.
		Yes, I'm looking at a photograph of you holding up a bent fork in your right hand.
		Whatever happened to the cyclinetic experiments?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Are they realistic?
unidentified		Do they work at a great distance?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		I don't know what you're looking at.
		Obviously, a different topic.
		Basically, well, if you really want a complete record of the program, including maybe where you have that picture, a guy by the name of Jim Schnobel has just written a book called Remote Viewers.
		It's in paperback, has just come out within the week, and really tells the entire history of both remote viewing and psychokinetic work, which pretty much has dissipated.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Doctor, you were holding a bent fork in that photograph.
		I'm not familiar with the photograph.
		Who bent that fork, and how was it done?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Okay, we're going to make the turn.
		The particular one that I'm pretty sure this comes from, I've seen this happen on a number of occasions.
		And in days past, this was when I was with the Military Intelligence and Security Command.
		And we were having a session of senior officers, colonels and above for the most part.
		And my boss, who was a major general, would get them all together about three or four times a year.
		And they would talk about real-world problems.
		And one of the things we did was to have a PK session, PK for psychokinesis.
		This was a naive group.
		And in this particular one, an individual was holding in his hand, as were a lot of other people, and there was kind of a commotion.
		He turned his head, and it dropped a full 90 degrees.
		I did not see that happen.
		However, I had a, I don't know if you know what a GS-18 grade level is, they don't even exist anymore.
		But one of the super great science advisors saw it happen.
		The man himself did not see it.
		And so they pointed it out, and then with the colonels and generals looking on, now the Fork, remember, is being held strictly at the base.
		There is no physical force being applied.
		And it came up to straight up, went back down to 90 degrees, and came partway back up to where it stopped, which is in the picture.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wow.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		The individual, to show you how enthused he was, he put it down and said, I wish that hadn't happened.
		And fortunately, we were sequestered and were able to kind of put him back together before he went home.
		And learned afterwards that he tried it again on his own and was able to do it once more and then said, that's enough.
		Want to stress, I had a quick talk with Penn Gillette here this week, who decided not to talk anymore.
		You know, him and Penn and Teller, who are real naysayers, of course.
		The individuals involved are strictly naive.
		They didn't even know they were coming to do, you know, that they would be involved in these sorts of things, had no expectation of it happening, certainly no trickery involved.
		Contrary to popular statements, we have had magicians.
		I had Doug Henning over at the house, and other magicians have looked at it.
		Happens, it's like remote viewing.
unidentified		It works sometimes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But the fact that it works at all, even sometimes, has got to be a source of intense fascination for those who would turn it into or wish to turn it into some kind of weapon.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		The answer to that is not really.
		It's fairly mixed.
		There's still a substantial number of people who said it can't be, therefore it isn't.
		I have told this story to people who look at me and just say, crap, you know, you're lying.
		And say, well, that's one possibility.
		However, as I said, in this case, we had about 30 highly qualified observers, and it wasn't a demonstration for people.
		It happened to one of them.
		There is, of course, the giggle factor.
		That's real.
		There are, you know, the things that happened with particular General Stubblebein over it certainly led people who were tacitly supportive to stay out of the line of fire.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I don't blame them.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		First time caller line, you're on the air with Dr. John Alexander.
unidentified		Hi.
		Good morning, Art.
		Good morning, Dr. Alexander.
		Hi.
		I've got a couple things I'd like to say.
		One, it needs to be addressed to you, Art, dealing with Dr. Alexander.
		But, Art, you've got some vomits on your line you need to get taken care of.
		I've been trying to call you for about four weeks on both the west of the Rockies line, your Watts line, and else by the way, 14 rings, got this robot female that comes on the line and says, you know, sir, everybody suffers.
		You need to get that off your line.
		But now, Dr. Alexander, for you, at the top of the program, you were talking about they were experimenting with this device to disable a motor vehicle.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Right.
unidentified		Okay.
		Now, this is getting a little far-fetched, but I've seen a flying saucer too in my lifetime.
		I'm 47 years old.
		But one phenomenon that is associated very greatly with flying saucers is car failures.
		The electrical goes dead.
		Now, everybody is theorizing that most likely this is being caused by some sort of a high-intensity magnetic field being generated by the ship's propulsion system, etc., etc.
		Would this be some, you know, if the technology was developed, would this be possible to have this put aboard a police car without disabling a police car's engine also and crippling everybody on the highway for about a half a mile run, you know, like some sort of a close proximity high-intensity disruptor beam or something?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Well, in the UFO literature, of course, stopping engines is a common topic.
		One difference between using electrical pulse systems that we were talking about and what you hear with the UFOs is the engines come back on.
		The engines that are stopped with electrical pulse power don't come out because the reason they stop is that you have burned out one of the components of the engine.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In other words, for example, the electronic ignition systems, you've burned out something in that or something more severe.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		I don't care which part, but something that you have actually burned up the system and it's not going to start again ever.
		You're going to have to go in and replace that part.
		It's also the reason that they're leery about using it on the public in general because you may have some significant auto repair bills.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Doctor, were you aware there is a regulation that allows with 30 days' notice for the United States to experiment biologically or chemically on civilian populations with 30 days' notice to local authorities?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That can be done.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		I have never heard of that, and I'd have to see that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, I'll arrange that for you.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		I would like that.
		If you get back to even when we were doing simple things like remote viewing and psychokinesis work, we always had what was called a human use board.
		Now we're all aware of certain misapplications that have been done in testing in the past, but my experience was that these boards were terribly conservative and you really had to demonstrate to both technically sophisticated people and lay people what you were going to do and that anybody who was involved understood the risks.
		That's why I'd be really surprised if you were going to do it on any large-scale population.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, let's say we wanted to understand the implications of exposure to plutonium on pregnant women.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		This conservative panel that you talked about at some point must have okayed that because they did it.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		No, we're getting a bit far afield from things that I, you know, that my personal experience has always been that boards and things have tended to be conservative.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Having said that, I acknowledge, I mean, you'd be naive if you didn't say there have been abuses.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wildcard line, we're on the air with, you're on the air, actually, with Dr. John Alexander in Las Vegas.
unidentified		Hello.
		Good morning, Dr. Alexander and Art.
		This is Will in Monroe, Louisiana.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
unidentified		Quick recap on you talking about lasers and things like that.
		I think the main problem with that is one still is cost, packaging, and then of course you would need a large platform, and then the reliability factor and of course the countermeasures.
		But kind of leading into some of the other is what are the possibilities of some sort of electronic system that could induce temporary sickness, change weather patterns, or create headaches, disorientations, things like that, i.e.
		HAARP program.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		HAARP.
		doctor is there any way that you know of that the weather can be controlled uh...
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		I think there are some things, and I'm getting a little bit far afield again.
unidentified		Have you ever heard of Trevor Constable?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, I'm sorry I haven't.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Okay, now the reason I brought that up, and this gets into, this is back to the esoteric side, if you will, and not directly at heart, but there's a concept of orgone energy.
		And I have seen certainly some videotapes, and Trevor James Constable, I think, now lives out in Hawaii, used to be in Long Beach, did some very, very interesting work, both anchoring storms and moving them around.
		To be involved in weather modification, there are international treaties that get to be extremely difficult because, as you know, if I cause rain to fall in one place, that means it's not going to fall someplace else.
		You're not really making rain.
		We're only discussing where the precipitation is going to occur.
		And so, in general, we've said we will not screw with the weather patterns because the implications, of course, are horrendous.
		I have only tangential knowledge of HARP, but to the best of my knowledge, that's for something that's really quite different.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you see HARP as benign, or do you see potential problems with it?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Or where do you come in on the HAARP question?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Again, it's not one that I follow closely.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		I believe we're looking at communications issues and some other technical things as opposed to I certainly do not see it as a weather modification issue.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But there may be it may be technically possible to manipulate the weather.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You don't think HAARP is necessarily doing that, but there may be other ways.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		I think there are.
		They're fairly embryonic in our understanding of them.
		But I have seen sufficient evidence to say an area that's fairly promising.
		Again, one of the reasons that most companies or agencies won't get involved is that the treaty requirements, if you're just going to do simple things like cloud seeding, for instance, you've got to go to NOAA and file what your intentions are and that.
		It's still a very interesting field.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, a lot of us suspect that it may be going on, and we want to know who's screwing with the Northwest.
		That's a joke.
		East of the Rockies, you're on the air, sort of, with Dr. John Alexander.
		Hi.
unidentified		Good morning, Ark.
		Good morning, Doctor.
		Yeah, speaking as a, my name is James First of all from Kansas City, Kansas.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, all right.
unidentified		Okay, speaking as a United States Air Force veteran and a veteran of Vietnam, voluntary, by the way, I have, and someone who believes in national sovereignty of the United States of America, I have a question directly that doesn't relate to these weapons, but to the doctor on his affiliation with the Council on Foreign Relations, whose stated objective, published objective, is to eliminate the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights.
unidentified		How can you possibly, with your affiliation with the military and your oaths you've taken to defend, preserve, protect, defend the Constitution, how could you possibly belong to an organization which publicly brags about the fact that it wants to move us toward a one-world government and wants to eliminate the Constitution and the Bill of Rights?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		This was inevitable.
		So you are a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Well, no, I was on that study.
		I think that most people have no idea what the Council on Foreign Relations is, and most of this stuff comes under absolute nonsense.
		You will find, as we did on the Council, the study that I was involved in, people of many, many different opinions.
		They are certainly not a monolithic organization that has any particular area.
		They have fierce internal debates, getting our report out the door after the study group had met and even deciding what they wanted to say in general took another eight months just of back and forth getting things approved.
		I just kind of reject.
		I have little time for all the tremendous conspiracy theories.
		They can come up with more conspiracies than anybody could possibly answer.
		I'll tell you, maybe after the, if you bring this up, I know we're going to go to break here in just a second.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		It is something, though, I think that has strategic importance.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, then we will talk about it.
unidentified		Good.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		My guest is Dr. John Alexander, generally known as the father of non-lethal weapons, and yes, associated with the Council on Foreign Relations Non-Lethal Warfare Study.
		So we'll talk a little bit about that.
unidentified		You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
		Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from January 24, 1997.
		Music by Ben Thede
		Premier Radio Networks presents Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
		Tonight's program originally aired January 24th, 1997.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		My guest is Dr. John Alexander, generally known as the father of non-lethal weapons.
unidentified		Non-lethal weapons.
unidentified		and we'll get back to him shortly.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Back now to Dr. Alexander, and we'll continue here through the top of the hour and then go to open lines.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Doctor, the Council on Foreign Relations, what would you describe their general goals to be, as opposed to what everybody thinks they may be?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		It's obviously a group of highly credentialed, well-thought-out people who look at issues of what our foreign relations should be with other nations in the world.
		They are made up of people of many persuasions, Republicans and Democrats and conservatives and liberals.
		And I certainly did not see any indication of one mindset or any goal or anything that was anti-American in any way, shape, or form.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So then their goal is not to eliminate the Constitution of the United States?
		No.
		No.
		A lot of people think that is...
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		I find that.
		Let me go to what I think is a fundamental problem here.
		And this will probably generate a lively discussion, and you can guide me as to how lively you're prepared to take it.
		But the answer to that question is a simple no.
		I think what we're seeing in the various conspiracy theories in general, and the reason I say it's a strategic problem, because it does impact at that level, is a fundamental fault in the American educational system.
		We just fail to teach people how to think, tell them a lot about what to think, but how to go in and critically analyze complex problems.
		We know, compared to education in Europe, for instance, where you have to learn about the rest of the world, we are so egocentric that we just think the world should revolve around us.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You mean it doesn't?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		We think so.
		I'll give you an example.
		When I was at Command General Staff College, my tablemate was from Pakistan, a brilliant guy.
		But one of his complaints was, you know, he said, I watch the three network news broadcasts, and all they do is they say the same thing over and over.
		If I want to find out anything about what's going on in my entire area of the world that encompasses at least 40% of the population of the world, he says, I do not get it anywhere on American news.
		You know, we worry about the United States, a little bit about Europe, and maybe Japan.
		We've watched that over and over again in Central and South America.
		It's something we worry about when we have nothing better to do, but even our closest neighbors are not something that we worry very much about.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's quite true.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We know very little, for example, about Mexico, and we may have cause to want to know a lot about Mexico.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		I think we do.
		I think that is something Americans would do a lot better to know about certainly Mexico as well as everything that's going on around it.
		We just refuse to take the time to do that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Where is that going to lead for us, that egocentric attitude on our part, which I agree with you, we certainly have.
		I've done a great deal of travel, and that'll pull it out of you quickly.
		But should this continue, what will it eventually lead to?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think it tends to lead towards a sense of isolationism, and we see that continually.
		Another piece of this is our very short-term focus, be it in business, economics, and government.
		We expect immediate fixes to short-term problems.
		And I think the problems of the world today are terribly complex.
		I don't think we understand yet the implications of the population explosion.
		I don't think we understand what is happening in the world as far as social structures.
		We were watching already the devolution of many nation states such as former Soviet Union, former Yugoslavia.
		You see these happening in Africa, just all over the world.
		You see organizations breaking up.
		In my estimation, what you're going to see in the future are social structures that align a long belief system as opposed to geography.
		And I don't think we understand the impact of other people's belief systems nearly well enough.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I've had occasion to do some interesting travel in the last few years.
		I went into Communist China, up into Canton, some other areas.
		And I think the American people, if they really realize economically what was going on in China right now, it'd scare the hell out of them.
		They don't have the slightest idea of the scale of economic activity that's gearing up in China right now.
		No idea at all.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		28% growth rate year before last.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
		I was also a doctor in Moscow and did some travel in Russia, St. Petersburg, elsewhere.
		And what I found was not what I expected.
		I expected great change.
		And what I saw was change at the margins economically, but politically, they are a total basket case.
		And they are a basket case with nuclear devices that they're not very well in control of, frankly.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		That's correct.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		And when I talked before about the potential for conventional threats that are out there, a rearmed Russia or subset of the former Soviet Union is not out of the question.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And with the political instability and the health problems of Mr. Yeltsin and those who might follow, it's got to be pretty sobering.
		All right, a lot of people still on the line talk to you.
		First time caller line, you're on the air with Dr. Alexander.
unidentified		Hello.
unidentified		Hi, Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Where are you?
unidentified		I'm in Nashville, Tennessee.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
unidentified		This time last year, I was in the United States Army, stationed in Haiti with Operation Uphold Democracy.
		Oh.
		I was a shotgunner at that time, and we used the non-lethal ammunition.
		But the biggest problem I saw with it was the fact that there were plenty of times when we could have used it.
		Devices such as the Flash Bang, which is just a crowd control device.
		It doesn't even actually affect any one person.
		But it seemed that our chain of command was unwilling to let us use these.
		And with the graduated response system, it seems like that by the time that we could have actually used any of these ammunitions, that it'd been more time for lethal ammunitions and that it might actually do more harm than good.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		It's a good point.
		Doctor, he says that they had them, but the chain of command was reluctant to use them.
		Is that a problem with non-lethal weapons?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Well, he's pointed to, I think, what's one of the critical issues.
		Having the weapons and having effective ones are only a small part of the puzzle.
		You've got to have doctrine like how are you going to use them and then you've also got to go and have a training program wherein people are trained on the programs.
		I had calls from Sink Lamp literally the week before they left saying, what kind of weapons can you give us?
		And he's obviously come in a little bit later.
		The answer is nothing.
		When you're about to embark on a potential invasion, that is not the time to be introducing new weapon systems.
		Another issue that's involved, I think this is a chain of command issue, is a matter of confidence.
		We understand bullets.
		We've been using bullets for centuries, so we understand the effects, and we understand it very, very well.
		The weapons that we're talking about now are not as well understood, and so there's going to be a learning curve wherein the chain of command, starting with a grunt, and they're probably some of the most important people, is that they have confidence that if they use a particular weapon, such as bullets or a flashbang or whatever, it's going to work and what kind of effects it's going to be.
		That also gets back to being a training issue.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's where I was going.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So it's got to be introduced at the training level, not when we're about to have an invasion.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, that makes sense.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		And the policy level, it says, how are you going to use it?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So then you've got a lot of people to talk into a lot of things before it's really going to come into general use.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think it's emerging.
		The general that ran that whole operation is General Jack Sheehan, four-star major Marine general, really far-sighted.
		And in fact, at my last conference, he was the keynote speaker.
		And he's just been involved in enough of these operations and says we have absolutely got to have these alternatives.
		And again, we're talking alternatives.
		We're not talking either or.
		But the kinds of operations such as uphold democracy demand that we have systems other than lethal.
unidentified		You want something between shoot and don't shoot.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		I'm going to go out on the fringe with you a little bit here, Doctor, for a second.
		Operation Blue Book, that investigated UFOs many, many years ago, concluded that UFOs were no threat to national security.
		End of story.
		Do you think that conclusion was practically correct or politically correct?
		And is it still true today?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Okay, we're going to change Folk.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		I believe that that answer was, in fact, the correct answer.
		And I think that's been borne out.
		No threat.
		Now, you've got to remember where we were at that time.
		We were still in Vietnam.
		We were worried about the Russian bear.
		And, you know, in the military, there's a saying that an action passed is an action handled.
		I think the Air Force didn't want to deal with it.
		You know, they had too much on their plate and anything that gets one item off, and these would have been basically nuisance.
		I know the UFO community doesn't like that.
		They like to think they're the center of the universe and that this is of utmost importance.
		My experience with most of the military is you'll find many, many people who are believers, supporters, people who had experiences.
		But when you get to an institutional level, say, okay, I'm going to make trade-offs, like I'm going to commit resources, and I have, it's a zero-sum game, it just doesn't cut the muster as something that's viewed as terribly important to national security.
		And that's why I think, well, that was actually Condon Report is what you're referring to as opposed to Blue Book.
		And the Condon Report said no threat.
		And they said, right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I interviewed a military officer who was in a missile silo control center underground in which a UFO appeared and activated, or more accurately, I'm sorry, deactivated several of our intercontinental-capable ballistic missiles.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Have you heard of that report?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Are you talking about the Northern Tier sightings?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I am.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Well, of course, there were a whole series of sightings across the area.
		One of the things about the Condon report that I find absolutely fascinating is that the recommendations and conclusions are not supported by the body of the text.
		If you read the body of the text, you would come out with an answer that says, UFOs are real, and they've been going on.
		However, Condon himself did not get involved in the study.
		He decided a priori, before the study ever started, this was nonsense and he was going to get it over.
		So he wrote it without reading the text.
		I have run into not only that case, but I know you're familiar with Bentwater's case.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I am.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Wherein some things happened that I certainly would have perceived quite differently and would have viewed as potential threat.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		It's my notion that by and large the giggle factor is so high, and I talked to Colonel Halt on this and he sort of confirmed it, that raising the issue to higher headquarters would not be considered career-enhancing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Career-enhancing, yes.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		So you better sit there and be quiet and hope that nothing bad happens than to say, boy, something really strange just happened here.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Wild Carline, you're on the air with Dr. Alexander.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Yes, good morning, gentlemen.
		Hi.
		Your conversation a few minutes ago, very interesting.
		I'm a public school teacher, so I have to disagree a little bit with your ugly America setup.
		But I was calling about the remote viewing.
		Every time I hear this discussed, and you seem to be the expert here, I'm not really sure what we're talking about, but the word naturals comes up.
		Do you know what those are?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Go ahead, Doctor.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Well, two types of things.
		A natural remote viewer, a guy like Joe McMonagall who had come into the program, who had experiences, and just it indicates somebody with whom you don't have to start with basic training and teaching them how to do it.
		What Ed Dames talks about and what evolved for a while in the program was something that Ingo Swan developed, where they set up a very sophisticated and hardcore training program wherein you could take somebody who is not a natural and teach them how to acquire these skills.
		So the natural is somebody who just does it on their own.
		There's quite a controversy inside the community as to whether naturals or trained people were better.
		And I'll let that argument rage.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Doctor, do you feel qualified?
		Now, I'm going to have Ed Dames on.
		He's going to be coming on, as a matter of fact, on the 30th, says he's got a big announcement.
		But a lot of audience I have out there is new, not familiar with the concept of remote viewing at all.
		And they will call me up and ask me, what is remote viewing?
		And it's a long, hard explanation.
		Do you know of any simple way to tell people what remote viewing is?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Well, in its most simple form, remote viewing is collecting data at a distance, and you can consider that both in time and space.
		A quick word is telepathy.
		It's not really, it's not quite right.
		But it's the ability to go out and view, if you will, an incident at a given time and place and report back information about that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But with mixed results.
		In other words, at times it has been eerily accurate.
		At other times, not at all.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		That's correct.
		And I think that's one of the big issues.
		As I said, I know Ed.
		I guess this is one of the areas we part a bit.
		I'm much more conservative on how I would accept the data.
		I think that, and this again is one of the downfalls in the intelligence aspect, was the lack of corroboration, looking at other sorts of evidentiary material and seeing if it makes sense.
		And quite frankly, some of these things just don't pass the it makes sense test.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. John Alexander.
		Hello, where are you, please?
unidentified		Good morning, Will, WTEY, Madison, Wisconsin.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
unidentified		I wish to place a question concerning the effect of some forms of energy put out by either the sun or possibly man via, for example, HAARP on the Earth's extremely hot interior magma.
		To make my question understandable, I need to succinctly point out that the sun now is in a sunspot minimum.
		However, it is again starting into its next sunspot increased portion of its 22-year cycle.
		And on January 6th, a very violent storm with all its energy blew full force accidentally right straight towards Earth.
		Will blew out ATT satellites.
		Will may have diverted the polar jet that satellite.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Will, Will, Will.
		Thank you.
		Yes.
		Doctor, we're approaching the top of the hour, and Will is exactly right, actually.
		One of our satellites, Telstar 401, was just killed by some kind of pulse and some sort of energy pulse.
		It slammed into the Earth.
		And that's a fact.
		And he's also right about the sunspot cycle.
		Can you devote one more hour?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, can you come up in the break just for a second?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I shall do that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We'll be right back.
unidentified		You're listening to Ark Bell somewhere in time on Premier Radio Networks.
		Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from January 24th, 1997.
		Tonight, tonight, we're gonna make it happen.
		Tonight, we'll put all of our things right.
		We're in the panel and so means some of them We're born for both brothers and night I want to love you, feel you, wrap myself around you I want to see you,
		see you, thank you alright We gotta get it right without a bomb We gotta get it right without a pause made
		my way And no one paid your way You're listening to Arch Bell somewhere in time on Premier Radio Networks tonight an oncore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from January 24th 1997.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		My guest is Dr. John Alexander generally known as the father of non-lethal weapons and we'll get back to him in a moment and we're beginning to go all over the map and that is what occurs when you open the lines and that's just fine that's what we're gonna do I've got a fax here from Major Ed Dames relating to a John Alexander and I will read that in a moment all
		All right, the following is from Ed Dames, just came in.
		It says, Dear Art, although John is a very spooky guy, that's what he calls you, John, he is certifiably trustable.
		You have my word of honor.
		It seems, if it seems, that he is skirting issues, it is only because he is plugged into very classified issues.
		He will not lie to you.
		Again, my word of honor.
		Compare martial arts.
		Once you use a certain technique, the enemy, or potential enemy, will be on guard for the unique technique that you used.
		So, certain techniques must be kept under wraps.
		And I guess that would be true.
		You said earlier there was about 5% of what you know that you could not talk about.
		If you were able to talk about that 5%, would I be surprised, shocked, horrified, what word would you use?
unidentified		No, I think you'd probably say, I knew that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I knew that.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		But the kinds of things you probably don't know are, you know, how good is it, and under what circumstances might they be used, and just how efficient, you know, what are the technical specifications, and that sort of thing.
unidentified		Uh-huh.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		But I think in most cases you'd say, well, I knew that all along.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		If our government, here's another question for you.
		you if our government uh had something some technology it could use in case we had a national crisis anarchy of some sort uh and that information was classified uh would you feel that people had a right to know that, or would you feel the government would rightfully keep that information to itself?
unidentified		That's quite a hypothetical question.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, it is.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Let me answer it this way.
		I think the government certainly has the right to keep secrets, and they do.
		Having said that, this is going to get back to the educational issue, and I guess I'd be willing to take on that teacher again.
		I think he just hasn't gone out and looked at the graduate schools and who's doing hard science there.
		But more directly.
		large conspiracies tend not to work.
		If you had, let's hypothetically say you had magic dust or whatever it is, let's just call it magic dust that could have some mystical kinds of capabilities.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		How would you do that on a large scale?
		That means that you've got to have large numbers of people over long periods of time that would have access to the information, the planning, and all of those sorts of things.
		And it gets down to just doesn't make sense.
		The other problem, and I come down on the side actually of being against most classification.
		And for this reason, I find generally the people that we fool are ourselves.
		Let me give you an example.
		I was in one of these NATO meetings, and I'll not be too specific.
		One of our allies came up and laid something on the table, a technology, and said, what do you think of this?
		And I did know about it and couldn't talk to him about it at all.
		And I can tell you, our people absolutely thought that we're the only ones in the world who had figured that out.
		And the problem is, I'll give you another, a totally different example, but I was meeting with General Abenson on a different topic.
		You know, he was the head of SDI at the time.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		And we laid some stuff out there, and he says, my God, can we do that?
		Can the Soviets do that?
		And we said, yeah, probably.
		And he said, I didn't know that.
		Here was the head of SDI, and we're keeping secrets from him.
		And it was not really intentional.
		It was just a matter of nobody thought to tell them these are the capabilities.
		So if you have the system that you hypothesize, I think it's imperative that you actually have wide knowledge because if we have it, the chances are other people do as well.
		That's why I think with some of the more insidious systems that we haven't even got to yet, whether or not you choose to develop them, you'd better understand them so you can have countermeasures.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, let's get to them then.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Insidious systems like what?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I was talking there.
		One of the sensitive systems we didn't talk about, the whole field of biology, we have a conundrum arising therein.
		We have said we will not do biological warfare and let's eliminate people.
		We're not going to talk about viruses or anything that attack people, but let's talk about materiel.
		There are bugs that will eat virtually anything.
		I used to say, look at all the interesting things.
		I now say, I don't know anything that we can't have some naturally occurring organism that will destroy it.
		Now, on one hand, we have a burgeoning biochemistry initiative because trash is a global problem.
		So we're looking at bugs that eat trash because they're good.
		On the other hand, we're saying, well, we wouldn't use them for war.
		So you're actually developing the systems, and the only thing we're discussing is whether or not you use them and under what circumstance.
		Now, that's a classic where I say, even if you don't want to develop it or use it, you better understand it because other people might use them.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, you're exactly right.
		Give me an example of, you say there are bugs that would eat trash.
		Interesting, but very scary if you apply that technology to the battlefield.
		How would you apply that technology theoretically to the battlefield?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Sure, the simplest thing is to look at oil.
		I mean, oil is a major reserve.
		Petroleum products are needed by all militaries to move.
		Now, one thing you've got to remember, these act quite slowly.
		We're talking about something that's going to take a few months.
		You're not going to go out and sprinkle bugs on the battlefield and have all of the gasoline get eaten up in a short period of time.
		That's not the way it's going to work.
		But as a strategic system, if I wanted to degrade, say, a country's entire oil supply, you could do that over, you know, inoculate it and have this happen over a long period of time.
		Remember, these very same bugs that I'm describing are treatment of choice in oil slicks.
		We want them.
		They're considered good.
		They're considered bad if you talk about it in another context.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How likely is it that we would create a bug that would begin eating but wouldn't stop when we wanted it to?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		My project manager on that used to call it the bug that ate Cleveland.
		And we said, well, we'd give up Cleveland, but, you know.
		No, the reality is that organisms have natural selection and they die out.
		We have never encountered something that would continue to grow.
		This was one of the questions when they started looking at biological attacks on the coca plants.
		They said, well, if it eats coca and after that crop is gone, what happens if it mutates to something else?
		And by and large, they just, they have never encountered a system that becomes omnipotent.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's fascinating.
		All right.
		First time caller line.
		You're on the air with Dr. John Alexander.
		Where are you, please?
unidentified		I am in Las Vegas, Nevada.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, Las Vegas.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
unidentified		How are you, sir?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Fine.
unidentified		First time caller, and I think I'm almost a fan of your show.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'm glad.
unidentified		For Dr. Alexander, I'm actually the director of covert activities for Penn and Teller.
		And I heard you mention Penn Gillette earlier.
		And I just wanted to clarify exactly what that was about.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Oh, they were here this past week.
		I went to see them Sunday.
		I actually gave them my car.
		I talked to Penn after the show.
		He greets everybody leaving or anybody who wants to talk to him.
		And so I asked if they wanted to talk sometime.
		I would agree that it would be a very interesting discussion.
		His response was that he would have to check it with Randy first.
		I assured him that Randy would know who I am.
		And of course when I said, oh, you mean the amusing, he said, I would die for Randy.
unidentified		Oh, you would die.
		Yes, I heard about you.
		They're obviously very skeptical people.
		And I just wanted to find out what that was about and make sure that there was no hint of them even recognizing the possibility of remote viewing.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Well, what I want to talk to them about is the incident that we discussed some time ago.
		And that would be my challenge to Randy.
		And by the way, his challenge is nonsense.
		It's absolutely unwinnable if you ever read the fine print in it.
		But I want to see them where not the magician, but a naive subject, i.e.
		a person that has no connection to them whatsoever, picks it up and has these spectacular, spontaneous events happen.
		Again, I want to emphasize that happen sometimes.
		It does not happen all the time.
		But I've seen it happen too frequently without magicians around and without people of any motivation to be fraudulent and under close scrutiny.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, I'm not sure the general public understands what the two of you are talking about.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Number one, you're talking about the amazing Randy, I believe, and his open challenge, which is, caller, what?
unidentified		You got me.
unidentified		Why don't you explain it?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Randy has been putting together, I don't know what it's up to.
		It started out as a $10,000 challenge to anybody who could produce a psychic event.
		And I think they're now up in excess of half a million dollars with backers that are pledged from other groups that supposedly will give him the money.
		The problem is I have not seen the actual writing for some time, but he sent me a letter once that said if I just read his book, I'd be saved.
		And in that, he had a copy of the challenge.
		And the challenge is written in such a, I mean, it in and of itself is a magician's trick.
		I mean, it's no win.
unidentified		I see.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Thank you, and thank you, Culler.
		So in other words, you're saying that it's impossible to meet the criterion that you set down.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		So absolutely.
		He has people that do pre-screening.
		They own all of the data.
		They don't have to release the data.
		I believe he's been seen at incidents before that he can't explain and he just leaves.
		I know there are people who want to take him up and the money is getting high enough.
		I don't personally see that as a useful venture at all.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, maybe there's a good, reliable psychic out there that's just waiting for it to hit a million dollars.
		Wildcard.
		Good luck.
		Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Dr. John Alexander.
		Hello.
unidentified		Yes.
		Good morning, General and their doctor and art.
		It's Bob from Pocatello.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, Bob.
unidentified		Yes, sir.
		You know, the black research that was being conducted by the National Reconnaissance Office under the National Security Agency, which probably gets about as black as it can get.
		I mean, it follows up on some of the observations in the book, The Body Electric, by Dr. Becker, the VA.
		And he expressed concern on secret naval experimentation following up on the principles of the Soviet LIDA machine.
		That is, you know, I separate two RF carriers at the whole body or brain cage resonance.
		You separate those two carriers by 10 to 15 hertz, which, you know, the brain delta waves, you induce sleep.
		And he spoke of a whole auditorium of people being put to sleep by relatively low power.
		And he was concerned because they were also experimentation at sinus heart rhythm frequencies, in which case they were able to get some effect there.
		And audio modulation, of course, the neurophone operates on these principles, getting test subjects to hear voices in their heads.
		You know, if a person doesn't say there might not be a political overview of this, and of course I understand that we have to understand what a potential enemy might be able to do.
		But looking at the possibilities of HARP, and I think you're stonewalling this person that called before the break and talking to ARP during the break is indicative there that, I mean, this might be one of those classified areas, but I think the general public has a right to know that, you know, there are capabilities in this area and be warned, don't you?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Are you stonewalling, Doctor?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Frankly, I broke up a bit.
		I did hear, let me answer at least as I understood it, because I heard him talk about the LIDA device, which was brought out back in the battle days of the Cold War and looked at it and did look like it had some capabilities.
		That was used in the Soviet Union as a, I believe, part of a medical therapy, actually.
		People were sitting in front of it and they saw low-level effects.
		Frankly, I think that's Ross 80, who is the one who did the work on that, and I have not heard any more on it in almost a decade.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And then he suggested that you were stonewalling about HARP and that you had told me the real stuff during the break.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Oh, no, that's not.
		We discussed practical things like how long are we going to do this?
		No, a HARP is not something that I have been actively involved in at all.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Doctor, you really are going to spoil all their expectations.
		Let's just tell them that you told me the whole scoop, and it's horrible.
		It's the worst thing you can possibly imagine.
		They can do anything they want with HAARP, and that's what we really talked about during the break.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Okay, and then you can use that.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Whenever you want to really boost your ratings, you can tell them you're going to go public.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. John Alexander.
unidentified		Hello.
unidentified		Hello?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Going once.
		Oh, wait a minute.
		I see what I've done here.
		East of the Rockies, are you there now?
unidentified		Excuse me.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm sorry about that.
		I had a wrong switch on.
		Go ahead.
unidentified		Yes, it's Pete, Chicago.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, Pete.
unidentified		Yeah, I enjoyed your show there, Art.
		Very interesting.
		I tried to get to the other night when you had Wayne Green on.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		But I think I brokered a better source tonight.
		I used to work at a shipyard, and I worked on a naval barge called the Empress, or Empress II.
		And the words that come out since then, it was a simulator, or actually a radiator.
		It radiated electromagnetic pulse.
		Now, I've never seen the thing operate it.
		The only feedback I've heard about is something about killing fish in the Gulf of Mexico one time.
		I don't know what was about that.
		What I would like to ask, Dr. Alexander, is does this electromagnetic pulse, as far as it harms electronics or polarizes conductive materials in it, is vacuum tube or analog electronics more susceptible than digital, CMOS, TTL, or anything else?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I can answer that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The answer is no.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely not.
		I mean, we wondered for a long time why the Soviet Union stayed with vacuum tube technology.
		And the reason was that it could withstand tremendous pulses.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And as a matter of fact, if there was an EMP pulse without really good hardening, about the only standing stuff that would still be working would be the vacuum tube stuff.
		The old stuff.
		And I wonder if they're beginning to stockpile some of the old stuff for exactly that reason.
		Maybe we'll go back and manufacture tubes again.
		Wildcard line, you're on the air with Dr. John Alexander.
		Hi.
unidentified		Yeah, good morning, Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, sir.
unidentified		Got a question for you.
		I heard the doctor talking about the Council on Foreign Relations and all that stuff a while ago.
		Right.
		And I realize that that's not something you typically get into on your show.
		But a question that I've had for a number of years, I heard my grandfather talking about the CFR and all this stuff.
		This is back in the early 60s.
		And a question I have is, where does that stuff come from, that ideology of a one-world government?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, all right, all right, all right.
		All right.
		We are going to a break now, so the good doctor and I will secretly pass information back and forth during the break about the CFR and then come back and talk about it.
		Doctor, stand by.
		We'll be right back to you.
unidentified		You're listening to Art Bell somewhere in time.
		Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from January 24, 1997.
		Coast AM from January
		24, 1997.
		Coast AM from January 24, 1997.
		Coast AM from January 24, 1997.
		Thank you.
		You're listening to Arkbell, somewhere in time, tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from January 24th, 1997.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, everybody.
		I always figured give people what they want.
		Anyway, welcome back.
		And once again, we'll be back to Dr. John Alexander.
		And I guess a further word or two about the Council on Foreign Relations.
		I really don't know what more can be said, on the air anyway.
		Back now to my guest, Dr. John Alexander.
		Doctor, is there anything at all additionally that you want to say about the Council on Foreign Relations?
		They have an intense, abiding curiosity about it.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		I guess my approach on these things has always been, why don't you go ask?
		I find that again the conspiracy theorists have these huge convoluted theories put together and know very little about them.
		If you just go ask them they'll usually tell you what you want to know.
		The other thing I suggest is that for people who think that these this is the way it's run, put yourself in charge of it.
		I've done this with some of the UFO stories and whatnot and I've said, all right, how would I do it?
		How would I go about doing this massive cover-up, this, that, and the other thing?
		And normally it ends up just an impossible task.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Then it's a good moment then to ask you about what is purported to be the biggest and best UFO story ever involving a cover-up that has gone on for years and years and years and according to you would be impossible to cover up.
		And that would be Roswell.
		Do you think something real happened at Roswell, real in terms of a UFO, or do you think that it is just sort of some sort of modern legend that has grown?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Roswell, to me, is a real outlier.
		I have got to believe from a number of first-hand witnesses that certainly something happened.
		It strikes me as that the mogul balloon story does not answer the questions and that the Air Force certainly did not serve itself well in the way it responded to Congressman Schiff.
		But then to transition and say, what was it, I don't know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		However, to suggest that something really did happen or that an event really did occur, and I agree with you with regard to the response to Schiff, I mean, a lot of records they simply admitted were destroyed, missing, destroyed.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Well, but they started out by stonewalling, which was stupid.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		And, you know, I've read the letters, you probably have too, that this colonel wrote to a congressman, and frankly, they were unconscionable.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, then that would suggest that such conspiracies could span many years.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		It tends, I think, to point more to incompetence.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Incompetence, all right.
		I've got a confidential source who would like me to ask you about something called Halon, H-A-L-O-N.
		Does that mean anything to you?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Talking about fire retardant?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Halon's a gas that's used for putting out fire.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, uh-huh.
		And engines shutting aircraft engines down.
		Right.
		Is there any use for Halon that we're not aware of?
		In other words, is there a defensive or offensive use for that gas that has been developed?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		It depends on I'm not sure what they're getting at.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		One of the things that we did look at, and this gets back to the first category, they were talking about non-lethal weapons.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		One of the things we were interested in is stopping engines.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		And certainly getting, you can do it with acetone or halons or getting any kind of something that basically gets in and stops the combustion system from operating.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Flame out, down she goes.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, basically.
		Now the problem is doing it in the air.
		That's extremely difficult.
		Getting the concentrations necessary on the ground are more feasible.
		Having said that, one of the problems is with most of the systems, all they have to do is wait for the gas to dissipate and you can turn it back on again.
		There are things that can go in and just burn up the engine, which is more effective if you're not worried about what happens to the engine.
		Some people worry about doing this in the air, and the problem there is a density issue.
		Getting the concentrations necessary at the right place at the right time is exceedingly difficult.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		missiles still do a better job go to a factor All right, first time caller line, call the wildcard lines, area 702-727-1295.
		All right, we're going to have to take that out.
		We don't allow last names on the air, sir.
unidentified		Oh, just Rod.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Rod.
		Okay, let's just use Rod from Oregon.
		Go ahead.
unidentified		Hi, how are you doing?
unidentified		And it's a pleasure to find that you are available in the western Oregon area.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Glad to be there.
unidentified		I'd like to make a few statements and then ask one question from the doctor as soon as I can get my computer back to where it belongs.
		There we go.
		Good morning, Art and Dr. Alexander.
		It's a great pleasure to find you here, and thank you for taking my call for the first time.
		Okay, go ahead.
		Let's see here.
		I'd like to make a few statements.
		Doc mentioned a few intriguing things about a device which will stop most electromechanical devices that rely on magnetism.
		And by the way, diesel engines don't really rely on an electrical ignition system.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, I think he mentioned that as a problem.
unidentified		Right.
unidentified		Well, you know, they fire by compression.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You might understand.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		He said that was a problem.
unidentified		So they couldn't stop the engine or a diesel engine because it was running on compression.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's correct.
unidentified		I see, yes.
		On the subject of non-destructive weapons, isn't it intriguing the reports of abduction cases, you know, how they go, stating the silver wand used to help subdue the perhaps unwilling abductee.
		It's just a thought, you know, from all the stories you read from anywhere from TV shows, tabloids, books, and things like that.
		It kind of seems like if this is true, it would be a non-destructive weapon.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, there are, Doctor, are there not the equivalent of silver wands, certainly, that when they touch somebody would disable a biological electrical system?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Well, the wand, fortunately I'm familiar with both fields.
		But the wands that I'm familiar with that disrupt the electrical circuitry do it fairly violently.
		And I know the people at Air Taser have a system that puts in an electrical shock, and they said they stop doing demonstrations because it looks like the floppy chicken, and it's kind of not, doesn't look as sophisticated as they would like it to.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In other words, it seems too inhumane to demonstrate.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Well, no, it really looks worse than it does, but what you're doing is short-circuiting the neural system and so that the body, the individual has no control over their body, so it tends to just jerk about.
		They recover fine.
		It just looks bad.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Looks bad.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		One of the issues we haven't talked about in non-lethal weapons has to do with what we call a CNN effect.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		And this is true with any system now.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You mean causing people to watch CNN for protracted periods of time will actually disable them?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		That's one way.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Now, what I was really referring to is that any weapon you use, or any time you use force, you've got to have it or be prepared to see it on CNN.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I see.
		That really is true, yes.
		Wildcard line, you're on the air with Dr. John Alexander.
unidentified		Hello.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hello?
		Wildcard line going once, going twice, gone.
		East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. John Alexander.
unidentified		Hello.
		Hi, Art.
		How are you doing?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Fine.
unidentified		Hey, I called you a while back and told you I was having trouble with the webpage.
		Yes.
		It was operator error.
		I kept forgetting to hit the return button.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, you see, it's the same with most aircraft crashes, actually, cockpit error.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Where are you calling from?
unidentified		I'm calling from Wyoming.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wyoming, all right.
unidentified		And I called you before the last time and mentioned that I was an acquaintance of a gentleman that had claimed to have been one of the first advisors into Vietnam.
		Do you remember that call many moons ago?
		Yes, sir.
		And his claim was that he was with the CIA in a military setting and that he had seen at the Pentagon some paperwork regarding Project Blue Book, and he maintains that contact had been made.
		And I was just wondering what the doctor had to say.
		That contact had been made actually many years ago and that that was a pretty known fact amongst the higher-ups in Washington.
		And I just wanted to see what the doctor had to say.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Well, he really did comment already on Blue Book, its content, and then its conclusion and the disparity between, apparent disparity between the two.
		Do you want to add anything to that, Doctor?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'll do that, and I'll give you a gratuitous anecdote that some will find interesting.
		I don't believe that contact has been made or anything like this.
		The comment on it that says that none of this is real is that Tom Clancy is a pretty good friend of mine, and he's not a supporter of these unusual areas, so I ping him from time to time.
		And we were, you know, he owns the Baltimore Orioles, so we were there watching a game and chit-chatting about these things.
		And I said, well, you know, what about UFOs?
		He says, well, it's simple or not.
		And he said, we asked specifically about Roswell and if we had it.
		And he says, no.
		He says, well, how can you be so sure?
		He said, somebody would have told me.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And that's probably a fairly accurate statement.
		It really is.
		West of the Rockies, although there is then the Goldwater conversation with a general that was very interesting, and I've got Barry Goldwater on tape who made inquiries about Roswell and was shut down very quickly.
		I don't know if you're familiar with that or not, but I actually have that on audio tape.
		West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. John Alexander.
unidentified		Yes, this is Pete and Portland.
		Good evening, gentlemen.
		Hello.
		Before I ask the doctor my particular question, I don't know if you talked to him anything about the Philadelphia experiment, Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No.
unidentified		Okay.
		Doctor, in Tom Clancy's, one of his recent books, Dead of Honor, he describes a weapon used by our boys as being a 3 million candlewatt searchlight that shines into the eyes of Japanese pilots and knocks them out straight through their optic nerve.
		I was wondering if maybe it might really be something more like a pulsing light that does brainwave entrainment, sort of an artificial epileptic fit at a distance.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Could you comment on that?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Tom actually got that from me.
		And as a matter of fact, the first raid in Debt of Honor is a total non-lethal weapons thing that we had decided.
		I feed him stuff like that.
		And what he actually, in using the light as he did there, that was at an airport in Japan, and it was showing the fallibility of non-lethal weapons because the plane crashes.
		In other words, they blinded the pilot and he couldn't land.
		As far as pulsing, the problem with that is that you can induce epileptic seizures, but predominantly in people who are predisposed.
		It's one of the problems you've had in discos and whatnot where you have strobe lights.
		If you find people who have had EEGs and you see delta waves that are embedded in there, you can trigger them, but it gets back to the problem of using any system against people.
		They will work on one person and not on the next.
		presumably if that was a weapon of choice you wouldn't have pilots subject epileptic seizure not you know what that You have later episodes.
		I see.
		I don't want to fight with a pilot that's epileptic.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Two of us.
		First time caller line, you're on the air with Dr. Alexander.
		Hello.
unidentified		Yeah, hi.
unidentified		I've got a comment and a question.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, where are you?
unidentified		I am in Santa Rosa.
		All right.
		The comment I have is you talked earlier about it was a non-nuclear blast, but the biggest blast short of something nuclear.
		Yes.
		And the thing I wanted to mention was I believe that is called a fuel air explosive.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Didn't you hear me mention that?
unidentified		Oh, no, I'm sorry.
unidentified		I must have been taking a bathroom break.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I see.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, during your bathroom break, I mentioned that, and I think the doctor's answer was that that may well or may well not be, but nevertheless, they did explode something over there that short of a nuclear weapon was a gigantic bang.
unidentified		Yeah, my understanding was it releases a fuel spray, and then what happens is it's ignited and it actually creates a megaton explosion.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is that roughly accurate, Doctor?
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Well, I wouldn't give it any specific.
		You can, you know, control the, it depends on the amount of fuel that's put in.
		It's called fuel error because it's a double hit where you send in the fuel, have it disperse, and then ignite, and you get tremendous blast over pressure.
		One of the areas that it was looked at initially was as a for clearing minefields because it would cause a uniform blast over pressure.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right, and it would just set them off.
		Correct.
		Wildcard line, you're on the air with Dr. Alexander.
		Where are you, please?
unidentified		It's Ethan in San Diego.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
unidentified		Yeah, I was wondering about the doctor think about the people, what is it, the Nazis basically disappearing over to Latin America right after World War II, as far as the Soviet Union shipping them over there for basically mind control experiments with drugs and the like they did with the Jews and the rest of that, the concentration camps.
		And 1945 to 62, 300,000 people in Colombia were murdered at the rate of 48 people a day for 17 years and the like.
		And the counterculture, anti-establishment, drug culture didn't start up during the Korean War with a beat nets and the hippies with harder drugs like LSD.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, in the center of your question is the Nazis did work, I believe, on mind control.
		Many of them did go to South America after the war.
		Did that technology continue?
		Are we using it today?
		Mind control.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Is that to me?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Oh, okay.
		I didn't know if you're still recapping or.
		I don't believe so.
		And again, we addressed this one earlier.
		I just think that the experience that they had, well, I can tell you, for instance, that when MK Ultra went down, remember all of those experiments were terminated, it happened that it was not an easy blow.
		And I know of people who actually lost projects totally unrelated to that one.
		And the only sin they had was to be kept in the same safe drawer.
		And as I mentioned earlier, I've talked to very senior people in the agency who just say, absolutely, under no way are they going to risk the wrath.
		The problem is that I think if Congress ever caught you dabbling with those things without permission, they would hurt your budget.
		I mean, that's why I say it's a golden rule issue.
		And sooner or later they would get caught.
		It's just not worth the risk.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Doctor, we're at the end of the show here, and I want to thank you for being my guest this morning.
		And we will have you back on another occasion.
		You're a fascinating guy.
		And say hello for me to everybody at the Institute?
		Yes, at the Institute.
		And the Council.
john alexander ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Take care.
		Dr. John Alexander, a pleasure.
		That is Dr. John Alexander from Las Vegas, Nevada.
		God, I love Doom.
		That's it for this week, folks.
		Dreamland Sunday Night, Dream Interpretation on Dreamland.
		Thank you all very much.
		Monday night, Tuesday morning, back with this program from the high desert.

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